As the composer behind The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, Alan Menken has created some of Disney’s most recognizable scores and songs. His canon has paved the way for modern-day animated musicals like Frozen and Encanto, and influenced a generation of songwriters working in film, musical theater, and beyond. With lyricist Howard Ashman (Menken’s collaborator until Ashman’s death in 1991), Menken was a driving force behind Little Shop of Horrors, which premiered off-off Broadway in 1982, and more than 40 years later is still playing at New York’s Westside Theatre. Hercules, which Disney released in 1997 and Menken worked on with lyricist David Zippel, just wrapped up a regional run in New Jersey, and will move on to premiere in Germany, while Aladdin (which also featured lyrics by Tim Rice, who helped finish Aladdin’s songs following Ashman’s death) is currently celebrating its ninth anniversary on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre. 

Today, at 73 years old, Menken shows no signs of slowing down. Disenchanted, the sequel to Enchanted for which he cowrote the music along with Stephen Schwartz (Wicked), debuted on Disney+ last fall. The fully animated feature Spellbound is expected at the end of the year, and he tells Vanity Fair that there’s another musical project in the works. But first is the live-action version of The Little Mermaid, starring Halle Bailey as Ariel and premiering in theaters on May 26, a project that led him to work on some new songs with Lin-Manuel Miranda. 

“My niece went to Hunter School and I would hear about this little boy named Lin-Manuel Miranda who loved The Little Mermaid,” he recalls to Vanity Fair. “He was asking questions about it, wanted me to sign posters, and was just fanatical about it. Then one day that little boy was a writer who had a new show called In the Heights. I thought, Was he the same Lin-Manuel Miranda? And now we’re collaborating! I’ve been amazed watching what he’s become in the world.”

VF recently spoke with Menken about reworking the 1989 film’s music and the groundwork he laid to catapult the movie-musical-song catalog for new writers like Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Bobby Lopez, Kristen-Anderson Lopez, and Miranda. 

Vanity Fair: You had Little Shop of Horrors, Hercules, and Aladdin all playing at the same time in the New York City area. How does it feel to have these shows still so popular and so present?

Alan Menken: I'm used to it. I've been coming back to projects for a long time. It certainly beats the alternative by a lot. So much of what I'm doing is about my illustrious past. But you know, I still have a future and occasionally I'll talk about that in therapy. I'm very happy with what I've done. But then, there's also what's next. The most exciting thing is the new projects, and I am working on new projects. 

Spellbound, tell me everything!

I can't tell you that much. Number one because it is an ever-evolving project. This is a very unusual story. It has a very ambitious, central theme. I am not going to talk about the central theme because it's all hidden in a fairy tale which involves a spell. But it's a theme that affects all of us in a contemporary way. I'm collaborating with [lyricist] Glenn Slater on the songs. Chris Montan, who was the head of music and animation at Disney from The Little Mermaid, to Tangled and Frozen is the musical supervisor. For me, it's a great return to work again in animation. Some of the team have never written musicals before. So there's been a lot of work in trying to make it more of a traditional musical and people pushing me to be more ambitious in a certain way. We are still working on it. We score in the fall. We are recording with the artists who are doing it: Rachel Zegler, Javier Bardem, and Nicole Kidman. I am going to stop there. 

Can you believe Aladdin is celebrating nine years on Broadway? 

Is it nine now? Wow. I feel old. 

What do you think has kept it playing for so long? 

It's a good musical. Tom Schumacher is as good as it gets as a theatrical producer. Aladdin is a lot of fun. The infectiousness of numbers and explosion of imagination make it really fun for an audience. You want them to want to be in that room and just have a good time.

When you put it on Broadway, you expanded the song “Friend Like Me.”

We'll add to it until you get the roof off the building. Right now with Hercules, we have “Zero To Hero.” We're gonna keep trying to inject as much fun into that as possible and raise the roof.

Turning to The Little Mermaid, the story about Lin-Manuel Miranda is fascinating because he worshipped you as a kid. He always talks about it. So I’m wondering how the collaboration for this movie actually happened?

What happened was Lin gave a lot of interviews about just that. Sean Bailey, head of film production at the studio, heard or read one of those interviews. He didn’t even ask me. He just went to Lin and asked him to work on the movie. I'm used to that. Sometimes I actually find out something of mine is happening in a press release. So this was a case where I heard I'm going to be working with Lin, I guess. We had a great time. He's really smart. He understands theater really well. He understands a lot of things really well. He's got this, as you know, stylistic brilliance that brings in hip hop and rap, and all old musical forms that help. Even though it's a composer, me, and the lyricist, Lin—when we were in the room, all those influences came to band. 

What was the first song that you did and why?

We discussed with Rob Marshall what he wanted. One was the Prince Eric song, called “Wild Unchartered Waters.” Then, there was the song for Ariel when she has her legs (doesn't have a voice), and she's singing her thoughts about all the firsts she is noticing for the first time. Then, there was a number called “Scuttlebutt” for Scuttle and Sebastian. It's this harebrained [song for them] trying to figure out what's going on because they hear rumors that the prince has decided to marry. They think it must be Ariel but of course it’s Ursela in the form of Vanessa. It's all this delicious imagination. Lin’s lyrics are to die for. We wrote a fourth song called “Impossible Child” for King Triton. It didn’t remain in the film only because dramaturgically we didn’t really need it. It was so great to work with Javier Bardem on that song and people will hear it as a DVD outtake, I guess.  

What about anything from Broadway?

This is a very interesting thing because it started with Beauty, then Aladdin and now Mermaid. It's not like a wheel that goes from animation through Broadway to film. It goes from animation to Broadway, then from animation to film. It seems like the animateds are the Rosetta Stone and each iteration becomes a new adaptation from that starting point. There was a song, “Her Voice” for the Broadway show. But Rob really wanted a new song for this moment of waves and all the wildness of what's out there in the ocean. [Ariel] represented that to [Prince Eric]; she being the girl who saved his life. Live action films are really a director's medium. They want to go back to what they saw in the animation and take it fresh from there. That seems to be the pattern and I go along with it. Besides the fact that clearly, everybody wants a new song for the live action film for awards consideration.

Was there anything from the original that you redid, or something about it needed to change?

There are some lyric changes in “Kiss the Girl” because people have gotten very sensitive about the idea that [Prince Eric] would, in any way, force himself on [Ariel]. We have some revisions in “Poor Unfortunate Souls” regarding lines that might make young girls somehow feel that they shouldn't speak out of turn, even though Ursula is clearly manipulating Ariel to give up her voice. 

Lin has learned from Stephen Sondheim and Jonathan Larson. But he also learned from listening to your songs over the years. What did you learn from working with him?

Each of the songs were a different formula of the two of us together. “Wild Unchartered Waters” was very much in my wheelhouse as a composer with lyrics set to the music. I think it was probably the most intimidating for Lin because he felt like it was really stepping into Howard [Ashman’s] shoes. For the first time, I took the essence of a piece of music that had been in the underscore of the original Little Mermaid. It was a very lilting feel to the moment. Lin asked to make it more edgy and more a two against three tempo-wise, if you know what that means. So we gave it a lot more edge and then wrote to that which took on this incredible excitement. It's a real combo of the two but he had really influenced the musical field. On “Scuttlebutt,” I wrote a piece of music with an implied melody line. Lin took that piece of music and brilliantly rapped over it musically. So there's this whole new creation. There was a great moment when Lin sent an audio file from the bathroom of an Acela Express. He’s holding the music I wrote and singing to me the idea of what he wants while you hear a rumble of the train in the background. So, it was a very freeform collaboration. One reason people will work a lot is because they're adaptable. I like to be in the room with whoever I'm working with and start from scratch to get the essence of what that collaboration will be. 

It’s interesting because you’re so often associated with Howard Ashman, but you only worked together for a short amount of time. Anytime I watch these renaissance movies (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), I wonder what you and Howard would have produced together if he were still here. You would have been like Rodgers and Hammerstein.  

Howard wrote Smile with Marvin Hamlisch. He knew he was dying as he was writing that show. It was a beautiful score. Everyone wanted it to be a light, frothy, chorus girl musical but it really was about the dark side of beauty pageants. Within that show, there is a song called “Disneyland.” Marvin had just passed away and I wanted to play the song as part of my performance at D23 that year. I wanted to make it my own as I performed it. So for the first time, I sat in front of a Howard lyric that I had never worked with before and it was a visceral experience. It is shiny on the surface, but there's so much depth in terms of what's being said; the references and the connections. I just lost it. It was so emotional to remember what it was like sitting in front of a Howard Ashman lyric. Howard and I know other shows he wanted to do.

What were they? 

We got halfway into a musical about Babe Ruth. We wrote five songs. We took the material and put it aside and moved on to Little Shop instead. Howard really wanted to do a musical based on a Damon Runyon story. The movie was Big Street which people know if they saw Being the Ricardos. It was that movie that Howard wanted to adapt and we couldn't get the rights at the time. I've worked on that a number of times since then, trying to figure out what Howard would have wanted to do.

Going back to all these people you have worked with over the years, with Lin being the newest one—

I have another lyricist I am working with at the moment. Nell Benjamin.

Of Legally Blonde, the musical.

We’ve got a new project that I shouldn't be the one to announce but we’re really having a great time.

Who is your protégé?

Who is my protégé?

You got one? 

No. I probably have a ton of protégés in terms of people who grew up on what I do because I see a lot of people doing the kinds of things that I do. Look at Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and Lin-Manuel Miranda. There are so many generational writers now. And people involved in pop, wanting to be in theater now. [For example], I wrote the theme song for Rocky V. Phil Ramone and I went to London and Elton John recorded it. He said to me he really liked The Little Mermaid and he wanted to work in animation. Of course, next came The Lion King. He’s writing musicals. Sara Bareilles and a lot of other people are finding musical theater to be this great form to work in. I guess, in any way that I've influenced that, I'm proud of that.